Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Metro Board approves new station at Aviation/96th as best option to connect to LAX people mover

The Metro Board of Directors on Thursday unanimously approved a new
light rail station at Aviation Boulevard and 96th Street along the
Crenshaw/LAX Line as the best option to serve as the “gateway”
transfer point to an Automated People Mover that would take people to
terminals at Los Angeles International Airport. The people mover is
being planned by Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), which would build
the project.

The next steps: Metro must environmentally clear the station, design
it and identify the funding before anything gets built. The Crenshaw/LAX
Line is currently under construction and the new station would be added
to that project. That project is scheduled to be completed in 2019; the
people mover could be completed as early as 2022 according to the Metro
staff report and officials with Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office said
Thursday that the city will attempt to possibly accelerate that date.

“This is a historic day for LAX and a
historic day for our city because we’re finally on the way to bringing
rail to LAX,” Garcetti told the Metro Board on Thursday. “I think we’ll
be able to fix a historic mistake of our past.”

The Metro Green Line infamously came up two miles short of LAX and
requires a shuttle bus ride to reach airport terminals. The new
Aviation/96th station would also serve some Green Line trains; please
see the conceptual operating map below.

People movers are a type of train and are used to connect to regional
transit systems by large airports in the U.S. and abroad. The chief
advantage of the people mover over the existing shuttle bus: the people
mover would run on an elevated guideway above traffic while the shuttle
bus shares roads with traffic.

The new Aviation/96th station would be about .4 miles north of the
station to be built at Aviation and Century boulevards as part of the
Crenshaw/LAX Line. The idea, according to Metro, is that
the Aviation/96th station would be the gateway for passengers headed to
LAX while the Aviation/Century station would connect riders to the many
businesses along the Century Boulevard corridor.

Metro Board Members made it clear that the Aviation/96th station
needs to be extraordinarily designed to serve as the airport gateway.

“The question before us is can 96th Street do what it needs to do to
be a world class experience?,” asked Board Member Mike Bonin who
co-authored a motion (posted after the jump) directing Metro to make the
station an enclosed facility with a number of amenities including
concourse areas, restrooms, LAX airline check-in and public art, among
others. The motion was co-authored by Garcetti and Supervisors Don Knabe
and Mark Ridley-Thomas.

LAWA is scheduled to finalize details on the people mover alignment
and the number of stations near airport terminals in Dec. 2014. In a presentation
to the LAWA Board in May, LAWA staff showed options that included two
or four stations for the people mover within the central terminal
horseshoe. Should LAWA move the people mover alignment back to 98th
Street — as was previously studied — Metro would seek to make the
Aviation/Century station as the primary connection point to the people
mover.

Metro — in coordination with LAWA — has in the past couple of years
looked at a number of options for connecting the airport terminals to
the Metro Rail system. Among those was bringing light rail directly to
the terminals or building a spur to a new airport transportation hub
that is being planned east of LAX.

Ultimately, Metro studies found that a Metro Rail-people mover
connection took about the same time and resulted in about the same
ridership as having a light rail line run directly into the airport
terminals. The Metro Rail-people mover connection also cost billions of
dollars less and resulted in speedier train rides for Crenshaw/LAX Line
passengers not heading to the airport.

In the future, it’s expected that about 57 percent of airport bound
passengers would arrive by private car, 33 percent by shuttles, taxis
and limos, eight percent by the Flyaway bus and one to two percent via
transit buses and trains, according to the Metro staff report.
About 66.6 million passengers used LAX in 2013, meaning even small
percentages can add up to a lot of riders.

Metro Board Member Don Knabe raised a salient point several times in
recent months: what guarantees are in place that LAWA will actually
build the people mover? LAWA Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey told
the Metro Board on Thursday that traffic has gotten so bad in the
airport’s horseshoe — up to 200,000 vehicles a day — that the airport
must build the people mover, a consolidated rental car facility and a
new ground transportation hub to steer more vehicles away from the
terminals.

The Airport Metro Connector is one of the dozen transit projects to
receive funding from the Measure R half-cent sales tax increase approved
by 68 percent of Los Angeles County voters in 2008.
Please see the motion on the Aviation/96th Street station that is posted after the jump.